Film

MATER THE SIDEKICK CAR Imagine that after   Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace George Lucas ditched the whole Anakin/Vader storyline and turned   Attack of the Clones over to Jar Jar Binks. If you can imagine that without crawling into a mental fetal position, then you can imagine Cars 2.   In this animated sequel from…

MEDIOCRE HERO Have you ever gotten into a conversation – and for the life of me, I hope you haven’t – about the supposed fascist underpinnings of comic book superheros? A film that accepts and teases this fascist nature is The Green Lantern. Test pilot Hal Jordan joins an interplanetary army built on the idea…

ABSENCE GROWS MYSTERY If Terrence Malick is a saint of cinema, then this is his holy lesson. Over a four-decade career, the mercurial American visionary has mastered absence and flowered a daunting mystery. After making one of the most impressive debuts in American film history, 1973’s Badlands, he quit talking to the press. After the…

WOODY AS WILSON, OWEN AS ALLEN Yes, you can believe what you’ve been reading – Midnight in Paris really is the best Woody Allen film in a long time. It’s a love letter to Paris, an ode to the Jazz age and the writers of the Lost Generation, and a romance with the past. It’s…

PACKED WITH ACTION, BEREFT OF LAUGHS Kung Fu Panda 2 breaks new ground in the history of cinema. Â  Everyone knows you can’t use 3-D in the second movie in a series. You have to wait until the third one. Breaking the 3-D sequel custom appears to be Panda’s lone innovation. Otherwise, this is one of…

WHO PIRATES OF THE CARES? The thing about Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides – if anyone still cares – is that it’s an improvement for the series. But that’s just it…no one still cares. Of course, the box office will argue with me. A disturbing number of dollars will pile into the bank…

AND THE NOMINEE WAS… The thriller Incendies, a 2010 Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film, is a Canadian product spoken in French about events that took place, fictionally speaking, in Lebanon during its infamous civil war. The death of a Canadian immigrant with a secret past, Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal), places the burden of discovery…

FIFTH TIME’S A CHARM It’s the moment that we’ve all been waiting for! No, not when Vin Diesel and Dwayne “The Rock†Johnson throw each other through a series of windows, as they sweat nails in a scuffle only missing a cage. (The moment when The Rock spits out broken glass is precious.) It’s rather…

HERE WE GO AGAAAAAIN! A train. A bomb. A bomber. A mystery woman. And a ticking clock. Source Code, the second film by Moon director and David Bowie offspring Duncan Jones, builds itself out of these classical Hitchcock-style elements. Through a computer virtual reality program, a military program places an injured air force captain onto…

METHOD SPOOKING There is one good thing about the indie horror flick Insidious, directed by the original SAW helmer James Wan: Â  the awesome retro-Bernard Herrmann-style score, all nutso violins in the key of Psycho. Otherwise, there’s not so much to say about a pretty conventional schlock horror story that might as well be made by…

BRADLEY COOPER LEAPS FROM DULL HEARTTHROB TO ENGAGING ACTOR Has there been some secret value to a flipped-out Charlie Sheen declaring himself the Nietzschean Ubermensch, living by a porn star code that mere mortals could only hope to appreciate? I would say yes. In his little henpecked heart, every man would love to stand on…

THE SAD LEGACY OF AN HISTORICAL MOMENT Making the Boys, the vigorous and absorbing new documentary, ostensibly about Mart Crowley and his ground-breaking The Boys in the Band, is, in truth, at least three (and possibly four) documentaries rolled into one, and put together with a sure and steady hand by the highly gifted and…

MY,GRANDMA, WHAT MISSED OPPORTUNITIES YOU HAVE Catherine Hardwicke, the director of the first Twilight movie, has a gift for conveying horny teenage moodiness, in particular as it applies to females. I’m not sure anyone grows up thinking that will be his or her gift. Nevertheless, there it is, and her take on the Red Riding…

UNFUNNY AND UNFUNNIER During their heyday in the nineties, culminating with There’s Something About Mary, the Farrelly brothers had the power to shock you into submission. It wasn’t just that the films made you laugh. They made you laugh involuntarily. They made you laugh against your will. Â  Which is the best sort of laughter. They…

2010 has been a year in which the indies, arties, foreign and prestige films overpromised and underdelivered, while the best genre and mainstream films delivered and then some. Hooray for Hollywood! . . . 10. The Social Network David Fincher’s Â  Facebook origin story is like the NFL team that wins the Super Bowl with the…

. . . . . THE ESSENTIALS: ANOTHER YEAR (Mike Leigh) . . . . . . . . WHITE MATERIAL (Claire Denis) . . . . . . . . CARLOS (Olivier Assayas) . . . . . . . . INSIDE JOB (Charles Ferguson) . . . . . . . . THE…

Stage and Cinema continues its traditional mid-February publication of   our Best(-and-then-some) Lists of the past year’s movies. Here is my list.   As always, I prefer to include every film I’ve seen, so if I name something as the worst of the year, you can check the list and say, “Oh, but he didn’t see Burlesque…

A SIGNPOST FOR THE DIRECTION OF SUPERHERO MOVIES When small children lay their head on the pillow each night, do they dream of running into a phone booth to change into Seth Rogen? A more popular figure in raunchy comedies than little boys’ daydreams, Rogen is one of the least likely Hollywood stars to play…

GIRL MEETS MEN She arrived in Fort Smith with two long braids, her father dead in the street, bent on revenge and calling it justice. All of 14 years, she carried the aura of a professional. She would quote the law. She would spook old men. She would hire the marshal least likely to take…

SOMETHING TO FIGHT ABOUT I once referred to Christian Bale as The Actor Most Likely To Tick Off His Wife By Staying In Character Over Dinner. Shortly thereafter, to my amusement, I read an article in which Bale admitted this was true, that his method actor’s commitment sometimes got on his wife’s nerves. With that…